Old Coding Issues
by Scarabbug
Summary: History has this annoying tendency to repeat itself, even if just in different people. Kind of like the Trojan War. Trojan. Ha! Yeah, like the virus. One shot, features Rick and a “Fred” theory.


This isn't my usual take on the fanon theory of "Fred". He's more commonly theorised to be a fellow D&D-style friend of Rick's, but I felt like changing him around a little for curiosities sakes. This is the result.

I'm also estimating Rick's age here as about his late thirties some time, which puts him in college some time in the eighties when yes, the Internet and banners did exist on a simple form. They weren't, however, usually available to your average student college student, I expect, but they existed, as did program coding.

**Disclaimer**: Ace Lightning and all related characters are not, in any way my property, this fiction is written without the intentions of gaining profit or enforcing such beliefs.

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Old Coding Issues.

He's good with the hard drives.

Looking at the kid on the monitor, that's about the only positive he can find. Oh, and he can get to the nearest decent takeaway and back in about ten minutes without a vehicle. Surprising that, considering he's not the most athletic looking of teenagers. He says he could go even faster if Rick let him use the truck.

Yeah. Right. Like he's going to fall for that one. That little incident with his front seat lost the boy just about any meagre respect Rick might've had for him concerning the staff vehicles. Not that that was much to start with.

Finding out that he was messing around with the Ace game and his computer systems? That just clinchedit. Another thing that's surprising about the brat.

_Better get out of my system, kid, you don't know what you're dealing with in there… _

There's a lot of… screaming going on. And running. Yeah, lots of that, too. That doesn't surprise him. He was never _Okay, I prefer 'never was' :P_ one for employing workers with backbone. Too risky. He doesn't do it with "real" employees (not that he's had many) so why should he do that with a fake one?

He flicks back to the other screen, figuring it might be more interesting to watch. Interesting is definitely the word. There's sort of a fight going on, (lots of yelling, anyway) and he can see the Knight's new "emotion files" are going absolutely nuts. He expected as much.

'_So, what, we're just going to sit here? Until Kilobyte works out a decent way to kill us? You realise how completely pointless that is?'_

'_If you've got any better ideas then I'd like to hear them, kid.'_

'_No… yes… I mean… look, what does it _matter_ whether I have an idea or not, Ace? We can't just sit here, either way!' _

'_Look, kid, there's nothing more to it than this. We failed. I'm… sorry I got you into this.'_

'_Don't be sorry for getting me _into_ it, Ace. Just work on getting us out of it. _

'_Why?'_

'_Oh for Pete's… Ace, it's not over yet, don't just sit there and accept it, I… Look, my dad's always saying, "it's not over till the fat lady sings".' _

'…_Who was she?'_

'_The final curtain, that's what. Which we're not at yet. I don't hear any singing, so it's not over yet, so just… cheer up, will you?'_

Rick blinks.

Well, that little burst of déjà vu is disappointingly predictable.

He shudders. Must be the blond. Blonds tend to remind him of Fred quite a lot. Especially the ones who always get the girl. This kid's got a girl, right? Actually he's had several… and he's barely in high school. The current one's a mousy blonde.

'Hey, it's not over 'till the lady sings, Ricky. Come catch some girls for once, you know you're not, actually glued to a computer.'

Rick doesn't mean to think about him.

He tries not to, most of the time. Fred's something he left in the dark way too long ago to bother wasting brain cells on. In theory, anyway. It hasn't worked out that way in reality. Still…

Hell, he's wasting enough brain cells with the coffee rush, why not fry a few more million?

He's got a picture. It's buried somewhere in his old junk room. It was Fred, on his own, taken on the day he won that cup back in High School. Rick's not sure he remembers what for. The triathlon, maybe? Something like that. Whatever. He remembers it pretty well, actually (always nice, having a photographic memory to fall back on when hard drives fail you so Rick only tends to forget things if he really _wants_ to). Blond hair and green eyes, and something really smug about his smile that made Rick's eyebrow shoot up every time he looked at it. Maybe that was why he'd locked it away. Standard looks for Frederick Lopez –either the smug grin or the me?-Got-help-with-my-homework? look. Totally unconvincing baby face. Always made Rick feel like throwing floppy disks at him.

There's that déjà vu again.

'Wondering what your friend's up to, Hollander?' He voices his thoughts aloud. Taking a moment out of the… it's not a _daydream_, per se –Rick doesn't _dream_, he _machinates_– his nostalgia, then, to switch some screens around and stick a few more monkey's into Googler's circus. Better keep the kiddies busy, and with the redhead around, the kid stands more of a chance than he did before. Then it's right back to…

Well. Remembering.

Rick always thought Fred just didn't have the brains to understand the stigma that usually came from hanging around with a "freak-of-manmade-environment" (Rick makes a mental note to track that Billy Sebring down and remind him of that lovely little nickname, once he's got control of the Americas). Because Fred… stuck around (and stuck even closer when he needed help with his "class projects") and it got Rick in and out of the bathrooms while the soccer jerks were in, without him taking an unexpected trip down into the stalls, so he didn't complain. It also meant Rick could play Dungeons and Dragons during lunch without fear of expulsion from his prep friends, because he could always say he owed Rick a favour for doing his math project for him. Why not? There was something… Trojan about the whole farce he and Fred had kept up for ten years or so. Like one of them was hopping back and forth between the worlds, disguised by the other.

Ha. Trojan. Yeah, like the virus.

And like all good Trojans, Fred got through and forced himself to be seen. Normally in the craziest ways he could think of. Trojans. Even when you think you're damn well rid of them, they hang around somewhere.

'_Come on, Ricky-boy, you don't mean that.' _

Well.

Maybe he didn't. Sometimes. Love-hate relationship? Are you freaking kidding? No, it was hate for most of the time, but for some freaked out reason he's never been able to trace, he put up with him. Well, he got beat up less when Fred was around. He was the… hard-headed sort. Until he decided playing chicken on a motorcycle without a helmet would be _fun_, that is.

_Idiot. _

And where the hell did his"staff" go? He knew Chuck had gone, because he couldn't hear the mad thudding of the keys and the occasional laugh of triumph and insult towards some coded bad guy on screen which signalled it was most definitely not work going on with that computer. For someone so smart, that boy could be pretty damn stupid not to realise Rick could hear him through the vents.

But it didn't matter. Not really. Because Rick knows the rules, and better still, he knows all the loopholes that even Chuck seems to miss.

'It may be over for you. But it isn't for me!' 

Well. This is an interesting development.

Sometimes, Rick really wonders how he thinks of these things.

To be honest he's not sure the brat –the one who just ran screaming out of his screen view being chased by a manic puppet master…he always prided himself on the… well, weirdness of Googler's design files, but for hell's sakes, can't that boy show some _dignity?_– even _can_ hate. Not yet anyway. He'd learn. If he got out of that videogame in one piece, that is. Though that really isn't part of the plan.

Still, all that screaming sure is one way to get yourself noticed. Not a technique he was ever dense enough to employ back in high school, but still a working method. He wasn't, actually, supposed to be noticed, now that he thinks about it. People saw Fred first, second and third. They saw Rick fourth. If he got lucky. He never got lucky. Not that he cared.

See, there's the cool kid, and there's the geek he hangs around with. It's a status thing. Kind of backwards for most people, but the right kind of person gets away with chatting to the geeks, and Fred was that kind of person. Fred didn't just get the status he didn't deserve. He didn't really _care_ about it either. Just like he didn't really care about Jessie, and Tabitha and Anita and all the rest of those brain-dead double-d cheerleaders. That made it more bearable, he reckoned. Sometimes.

That was just how it works. It's like a math problem. You buck up your own credentials by a fair few points by making sure you've got a loser on your right hand side making you look good. He doubts the High School status chain has undergone any kind of major uprisings that set the geeks on top since Fred won the Triathlon Cup in tenth Grade.

Big deal. He's worth more than every one of those suckers put together, and those who he isn't? Well, that'll change soon enough.

'First rule of the new world order: swimming, bicycling, and running will all be made illegal… And hurdles too. And shot-put. And Hockey. Karate. Basketball. Cheerleading…

_Oh hell, I'll just eliminate sports altogether. Why not?' _

Yeah. He's worth more than them.

'_Even Fred?_

'_Specially him.' _

Yeah. He knows all about Fred's type. He knows what happens to them too. And it sure as hell doesn't usually involve giant mutant wasps.

It's a couple of hours later he gets bored of waiting for Random Virus to snap (_damn sporadic good-evil programming codes_. _Seemed like such a damn good idea in production…_) and decides to send in Fred.

Not his Fred. Duh. Not top-of-sports, let's-practise-football-you-can-hold-the-ball, ladies-guy, don't-you-diss-my-best-bud Fred. Nah, more like ugly-as-sin-weird-mutant-creation-of-evil-with-_really_-sharp-fangs Fred.

It's… a pretty big achievement, when Rick thinks about it. Sure, he'd known the potential for fusing data with reality and had entered as much in his data storage documents, but he hadn't expected Kilobyte to actually bring the theoretical situation into play (another thing he was going to have to keep a close eye on) because that thing was just a normal wasp one minute and the next some… some crazy mutant, three times the size of your average human teenager. With poison sting and killer pincers to boot.

Who also happens to be called Fred. Which, asides from being complete ridiculous name for an evil minion is just a bit too much of a coincidence for Rick to feel comfortable about it.

Okay. So no, he has no idea in hell how _that_ total fluke came about. Luck, maybe? No. Kilobyte doesn't (isn't supposed to) have enough free will to come up with a name that wasn't already processed… Kilobyte behaves the way Rick wants him to behave. Or expected his type too, at least.

He figures that he probably inputsome of Fred's old codes or something. Not that Fred knew the first damn thing about coding, but Rick had made him a few simple "banners" (or the eighties equivalent, anyway) in their pre-net days and labelled them with his best friend's name. Somewhere in his current system, all that old stuff was still buzzing around, topped up by about a thousand upgrades built one on top of the other since the mid eighties. The coding he used on those simple little 2D stick figures had stuck around in his hard drive, way, way back. But he figures it's not _impossible_ that the message could have… carried on somehow. Like it does in a game of Chinese whispers.

So. Anyway. "Fred" (original Kilobyte ain't) is brought into play, and flies to his Master's aid quite happily.

He likes that. The flying. He's not into those kind of high speed thrills, usually, but this is different because he's still nice and safe behind his screen. The way it makes you feel like you're holding the greatest power that ever existed in the palm of your hand. _Which I do, of course. _

And he knows he's got to make them understand that. The people he used to know. The people he knows now who never quite appreciated his genius. He's not sure if that's a geek thing or a needing-to-take-over-the-world thing. Either way, he fits it. And the world will understand that, one day.

…If that damn mutant wasp would just hurry up with eliminating the good-guys already.

Its only half an hour later when the extent of what he's actually doing hits him.

Only _he's_ not really the one doing it, is he? No, he's just giving the commands. The organ grinder tells the monkey to dance. A damn powerful, freaky looking, power sucking example of a monkey, but nonetheless. All he does is type in a few code signals and the freaks do all the work. Simple. The mortal stops swinging for a moment, letting the metal rod in his hands slip, and Kilobyte attacks him, taking the opportunity when his back is turned. A tentacle wraps around the mortal's wrist and… ooh. _That's_ probably gonna hurt.

_Funny_. Rick didn't program him to do _that_. Kilobyte's malicious streak is coming through. Of course, Kilobyte likes to see them struggle. Rick designed him _that_ way.

They hadn't actually… _hurt_ any humans yet. Not like this, anyway. He's not totally sure he wants to see it happening, but then it's a little like watching a train wreck. Maybe all the auto-links to his webcam systems he built into their coding weren't such a good idea after all.

To be honest he just didn't expect the kid to DO that. To stand up for himself, to… to come at his monster –his _creation_– with a metal rod and honestly expect it to back down. What is he? Insane? Or maybe just desperate.

'_Ohh boy, this is gonna get messy.'_

Kinda unfair, really.

Life wasn't ever fair, though, was it?

And when he remembers that, it's easier to watch. Because really, he's seen this all before. Last time he didn't have a choice but to watch it, and now he does. So he keeps watching. Wondering if (when) the boy is actually going to stop lashing out and let Fred get at him already.

Stupid kids…

He decides to check on whether or not the Googler has caught up with his employee and switches to another computer screen.

…No sign of them.

Risk starts, staring at the computer screen in… surprise, he flicks through a few levels with a joystick but it's official, there's no sign of the mortal brat and no sign of the knight.

Oh. Great. Damn. Damn. Damn.

They got out… must've been when he wasn't looking, the stupid…

Okay. No problem. It's not like he needs one of his employees to go missing anyway, that's not going to look good with the police. Plus, who would rig the extra hard drives?

At least Fred is doing his job right. For once. Big difference between the Fred's there –this one actually does what you want him too, when you…

Okay.

Rick's going to stop equating his high school… friend to some giant mutant wasp, now.

The other brat? It's going to be a bit harder to distinguish there because…

Well. Just because.

They'd better hurry this up. It's way past closing time already…

_fin. _**

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Reviews and concrit are mightily appreciated.**


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